Teaching Information Visualization - Information Visualization: Human-Centered Issues and Perspectives - page 74

- The instructor gives lectures on mandatory meetings. Students can pick spe-
cific topics and lecture about a topic that the other students have not read
about.
- Papers are assigned, and there are written/oral questions on readings.
- Papers are assigned, and students must write a structured critical review
(about half a page) of them, i.e., a paragraph on the paper's content, an
evaluative paragraph and an indication as to whether and why other students
might read the paper.
Practical Exercises: Software projects or practical exercises were viewed as
being very important to most attendees. These projects allow students to demon-
strate/learn the diculty of many practical problems, such as the drawing of a
graph or navigation in large information spaces. Using a visualization tool (Spot-
fire,TableLens,...)allowsthestudentstointeractwithdifferentvisualrepresen-
tations and to gain experience about the advantages/disadvantages of different
visualization techniques. Furthermore, students become acquainted with com-
mercial tools. One interesting experience of attendees following this approach
was that students' negative impressions of InfoVis systems mostly involved user
interface or HCI issues, not the actual visualization technique(s).
One problem with such exercises is the potential diculty in gaining com-
mercial software for use in the projects. More vendors are making their systems
freely available for educational use, however. Tableau Software is an example of
a company doing so. Another issue is the challenge of finding “good” data sets to
be used by the students. One suggestion was use data sets from previous InfoVis
Conference contests but most attendees felt that the contest datasets are too big
and complex for introductory courses. Still, the contest data sets may be suitable
for advanced level courses where students have a good background in the most
important techniques. Perhaps, the contest should include the production of a
data subset, specifically designed for educational purposes.
Using Other Media: Workshop attendees discussed that a large and com-
prehensive public collection of InfoVis-related images and videos would be very
helpful for instructors. Videos of interaction scenarios that show the usability
and interaction capabilities of the tools would be especially beneficial. Images
also could help to illuminate the history of InfoVis and illustrate different vi-
sualization techniques. Unfortunately, gathering a collection of images or videos
in this way could cause copyright problems. This may be why many instructors
have their own image/video archives with private access. The HCC Digital Li-
brary [24] of Georgia Tech is an example of an effort to gather a large collection
of educational resources, but it is focused broadly on HCI, not just InfoVis.
Another possibility to obtain video material is to examine conference DVDs,
such as the annual VIS/InfoVis/VAST DVD. Many contributions provide an
additional video to clarify the usage and interaction techniques of their work.
Again, it may be beneficial to encourage attendees to develop video summaries
of their work, specifically for teaching and learning.